For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and 'Goldfinger' Part 5

Almost fifty years ago, in the film journal Sight and Sound for Winter 1964/65, critic Roger Hudson wrote that the talent of motion picture production designers “is often overlooked, except where it is the greatest element in a film’s success, as it is in Goldfinger.”

The greatest element — that’s a bold claim, considering the hot competition among the movie’s other collaborators. But in hindsight, few would argue that the marvelous sets, vehicles, and spy gadgets of Goldfinger, masterminded by production designer Ken Adam, are any less iconic than Ian Fleming’s novel, Sean Connery’s performance, or John Barry’s musical score.

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Production design is a largely unsung art. Both the script and the need for historical accuracy tend to serve as harsh governors on the dreams and fantasies of the people charged with designing a movie’s sets and props. But the Bond films, Adam says, “are done so loosely that the script isn’t the Bible that it is in most films. It changes all the time, and the whole process of writing is like some democratic debating society.”

When Dr. No went into production in 1961, Adam got a mere 14,000 pounds (out of the movie’s total budget of 350,000) with which to design all of the interior sets for this “tongue-in-cheek spectacular,” including the casino in the opening scene, Bond’s apartments, M’s office, and the sprawling, futuristic lair of the villainous doctor himself. He performed his task in England while the rest of the cast and crew were off filming exteriors in Jamaica, and when they returned they were stunned by what they saw:

[youtube 2XknK67J5B0 — click here to watch in full-screen HD]

Adam, originally a German who fled to England with his family before the War, called on his love of German Expressionism to invent outrageous sets that were, as he called them, “theatrical realism. . . exaggerated practicality. . . hyper-reality by design.” Larger-than-life, yes, but still of life, much like Fleming’s novels themselves. “Nobody could foresee the success of Dr. No,” Adams insists. “What happened was like magic, almost.”

Two years later Adam arrived on the set of his second Bond film, Goldfinger, with a budget many times that of his previous effort. His first task this time out was designing the new car Bond was to use. He settled on the Aston Martin DB5 because, “It was sort of the most prestigious British sports car at the time. We couldn’t have used a Ferrari or something like that, you know.”

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An admitted “sports-car freak,” Adam went nuts pimping out Bond’s ride with its now-legendary array of special options, using the rationale that “all the gimmickry and gadgets were just what I would have wanted in my own car.” The entire crew was encouraged to submit their own ideas for upgrades, and by the time he was finished he had spent 25,000 pounds — almost double the total production design budget of Dr. No — on the Aston Martin alone. As it happened the vehicle was only on screen for thirteen minutes, but Adam’s conception of it was so wildly inventive and fun that it became the most famous car in movie history.

The sets for Goldfinger were no less well imagined. Everyone has their own fave: the gorgeous apartment where Bond wakes to find his lover covered in gold paint, the vast Bank of England dining hall — bad brandy, good cigars — where Bond gets the details of his mission, the cavernous laser room where our intrepid hero nearly becomes special agent castratum, the plush confines of the Lockheed jet where Bond meets Pussy Galore and outfoxes the clever peep-holes used by the lovely Mei-Lei.

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Everything in the film drips with the opulence, style, and color for which the Bond series is known — all of it spawned from the mind of Ken Adam, and laid out in drawings inspired by his life experiences and unique visual sense. “No design is worth doing if you just reproduce reality,” he stresses. “I don’t believe you can get a sense of reality by copying. I think you can get that better by not copying. But you must always be honest. You mustn’t do things just to create chi-chi effects. You must have a reason.”

Take Auric Goldfinger’s breathtaking Kentucky country estate, with its stables and Playboy Mansion-like diversions. Adam remembers that

We called the set where he keeps the harnesses and tack the rumpus room. . . I knew this rumpus room had to convert into a gas chamber, so all the walls were designed to close. Even the big stainless steel fireplace came down so that no fresh air could get in. It was pretty horrifying, actually.

And at the same time the other moving objects, like the billiard table, had a practical purpose by turning round and becoming the briefing model of the raid on Fort Knox. The rotating bar was a little gratuitous, but once I’d started I thought, “I might as well!” So it turned from a rather harmless-looking, luxurious tack room into a combined War Room and gas chamber.

Check out the finished set in the following clip, and as each shot reveals new architectural glories and wonders, keep in mind that this isn’t some real-life room rented from a billionaire’s mansion, it’s a movie set, built from scratch and designed from the ground up by Ken Adam:

[youtube Zv5cEmDMrd8 — click here to watch in full-screen HD]

Theatergoers in 1964 were dazzled by these ingenious sets, and almost a half-century later they have yet to lose their ability to inspire awe.

This elaborate design came from a deeper place in Adam’s psyche than may at first be apparent. He lived most of his life in England, but he was born Klaus Hugo Adam in 1921 Berlin, emigrating to the UK only when the rise of Hitler threatened his family’s safety. During the war he became the only German-born pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving his adopted country with distinction against the country he was originally from. Twenty years later, during the making of Goldfinger, he still hadn’t got past the dichotomy of his upbringing. “Remember it was the 1960s,” says Adam:

The Second World War was still very much in everybody’s minds. . . I had to keep in mind that all the gangsters are going to be finally poisoned by gas, you see. . . .

When the Germans now write about me, it’s not that they say, “he was affected by the sadistic ideas of the period,” but I grew up with some of these things. So knowingly or not knowingly, I tried to show some of those impressions, my early impressions, in my designs. . . it’s mixing this kind of playful fantasy with the ultimate horror.

[youtube Kzhk_AUV_-w — click here to watch in full-screen HD]

Given Adam’s background and influences, it’s not going too far to posit that Goldfinger’s luxurious abode, so wondrous and modern yet laced with a sinister aspect, beggars comparisons to places like The Berghof, Hitler’s “eagle’s nest” hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, where profoundly evil men enjoyed the very best wine, women and song as they poured over intricate maps, scale-models and globes while plotting the assembly-line domination and destruction of whole populations. And the fiendishly clever bit of mechanized death that lies at the heart of Goldfinger’s “rumpus room,” with every avenue of escape clipped off like the tickings of a well-designed watch, evokes painful memories of the meticulously engineered real-life abattoirs of the Holocaust.

“In hindsight,” Adam says, “I think Goldfinger was maybe the best example of a Bond film that I designed, where the settings accentuate the dramatic message of the film. I had a completely free hand.”

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The Cold War was a constant presence in the work of Adam throughout the Sixties, not only in the Bond series but in films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964 — where he designed the memorable War Room for Stanley Kubrick, foregoing the chance to work on From Russia, With Love to take the job), as well as more realistic spy films like The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), both starring Michael Caine. But perhaps his single greatest Cold War set, the one that veers the furthest into cinematic outrageousness while remaining utterly convincing, was the interior of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox as depicted at the end of Goldfinger.

“I’d seen the vault of the Bank of England,” says Adam, “and you know gold is so heavy, so it’s never stacked more than two foot or two-foot-six high. . . I’m sure the inside of Fort Knox is very dull, with low vaults and a few trolleys traveling around.” But of course, for a Bond movie dull simply won’t do. “The public wanted to see gold!” Adam thought, and so he gave it to them using all of the sumptuous splendor he could muster. “If you go to the biggest gold depository in the world you expect to see gold towering up to the heavens. . . I wanted to build a cathedral of gold, almost forty foot high — completely impractical.”

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Adam was aided by the fact that, due to stringent security, virtually no one among the public knew what the interior of the Depository looked like. There were no pictures floating around, no descriptions of any kind:

Remember, the President of the United States wasn’t allowed inside. And I was really rather pleased about that. Because it gave me the opportunity to design it the way I thought it should be designed, with gold stacked up to forty feet in height. I also liked the concept of putting the gold behind bars, you know, spectators being on the other side. I liked playing around with that. . . a surreality, which in fact is accepted by the audience as reality.

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The final result of his designs inspired veneration in audiences. Film scholar Christopher Frayling, a keen follower of Adam’s career, recalls his first viewing of Goldfinger back in 1964: “The audience erupted with applause — even at a matinée — when Oddjob got his comeuppance by being electrocuted. . . I’d never known a cinema audience to spontaneously applaud like that. But there was something about the way in which the sequence worked; it satisfied everybody.”

The towers of gold, the impregnable bars, the futuristic elevators, Oddjob’s deadly bowler hat, the bomb threatening to make the bullion holdings of the United States radioactive — all of these things were designed by Adam and the rest of Goldfinger‘s art department out of whole cloth, following Adam’s crucial decision to go whole-hog and make the Bond series not a humdrum copy of reality but the stuff of which cinematic dreams are made of.

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Adam likes telling an apocryphal story “from reliable sources” about how the newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, upon entering the White House for the first time, demanded to see the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and was dejected when his handlers informed the “amiable dunce” that none in fact existed outside of the film. Liberals have perpetuated the story ad nauseam ever since (usually prefacing it by such well-worn phrasings as “it was said that. . . ,” “I’ve heard that. . . ,” “According to many sources. . . “) because it fits neatly into their fantasy view of conservatives in general and Reagan in particular. But, although they won’t admit it, many of those same people were themselves taken in by the glittering interior of Fort Knox in Goldfinger. “Everyone is now convinced Fort Knox looks like that,” Adam says, “As a film designer you can create a reality which is more acceptable to the public than the actual thing. . . United Artists got so many letters saying, how were we allowed in when the president wasn’t allowed, and so on. So I consider that a successful design.”

The late critic David Sylvester went much further than that, calling Adam’s sets “probably the most amazing and enthralling pieces of fantastic architecture in the history of talking pictures.” Millions of viewers around the world — from Presidents on down to the poorest kid at the cheapest matinée — would agree.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our pleasure cruise of Goldfinger with a study of the best critical volume written about Bond, wherein a conservative writer defended 007 in the wake of a widespread academic and media backlash against the series.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

For Conservative Movie Lovers: Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and 'Goldfinger' Part 5

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